As part of my inconsequential blabber of my shift to Debian, heres more. :-D

As most of you know Debian still has a default install of a linux-2.4 kernel. So I finally upgraded to linux-2.6. One of the positive outcomes out of that was that all parts of my "Audio System" are working now. Previously on 2.4, only music players and 'aumix' worked. No other mixer (including the gnome-volume-control-applet) worked. It all seemed shitty.

But as soon as I upgraded to 2.6, just as I suspected, everything came back to normal. I guess it was just one of those things where Debian is ALSA based, where as linux 2.4 still had OSS. Now everything is ALSA. Everything works (sound wise....atleast till what I've checked).

Two more things came to my notice though. My Sound Recorder (in gnome) doesn't work. Have to investigate that. Also the default sounds for the Gnome Desktop (part of the gnome-audio package) suck. HARD! I wonder if anyone uses them either. It did however made me nerdy-nostalgic about the time when cool themes (with various sounds) was all the rage for me.

Hey so after using RedHat/Fedora distro's for 6-8 years... well since I started using linux, I've finally moved to Debian.

How did it happen?! Well I got news of FC3's release, so I downloaded the images. Then I set about burning them on CD. Just then I bumped into my Debian 'woody' CDs, that I had burnt for some reason (I forget :-/).

Anyhoo, so since I was reinstalling, I said might as well give Debian a shot finally. =). And I'm liking it more than ever before! Not that I think that Fedora is not a good distro. It was just that I finally realized that Fedora was not my kind of distro.

I'm involved in Gnome development (off and on), and I felt that Gnome was too tightly bound to the distro as a whole in Fedora. This meant that if I need an immediate Gnome upgrade, I'd have to wait for the next Fedora relase. Yes, I know some people might say that there are ways to get past that, but...ain... i r lazy :-P

Anyhoo, I guess what will follow over the next few days would be my experiences get acquainted with the "Debian Way".

So I decided to clean up my Java Framework installs on my box. I had FC2 installer have gcj & friends installed, though I ended up using the j2sdk from Sun. So I though might as well just remove gcj stuff (my reasons are purely untechnical. I do no research)

Anyhoo, as I tried to remove libgcj, I got a whole lotta dependencies. And I thought it a pain to "rpm -e" each one separately (Which I'm suprised I did usually uptil now). Then I remembered I had RC2 installed.

So I fired it up and marked libgcj34 for removal. It checked its dependency chart, gave me all the dependency required to remove, I clicked "Continue", and VALA!

Went for OZZFEST 2004 at Camden, NJ today :-). It was SOOO awesome! They had a long lineup of bands playing from 9 in the morning uptill midnight. However I was going for only 2 bands..

Judas Priest and Black Sabbath!

Got in at around 5PM. Some stupid band by the name "Super Joint Ritual" was playing. And even more stupid people were getting a huge mosh pit going. Thats when I learned my rule for mosh pits.

They are fun, as long as you see them from a distance :-D

Anyway, Judas Priest rocked! Played good hits like "Hell Bent for Leather" and "Breaking the Law" among others.

Then it was Black Sabbath's turn. A guy from the local radio station who sponsored the event comes on stage and my worst fears are realized. Ozzie ain't coming, because he is down with bronchitis apparently!

Anyway I felt Black Sabbath still rocked (some old friend of Ozzie's from Birmingham was on vocals).

So yesterday I checked in initial code for gconf-schemas-writer in Gnome CVS. gconf-schemas-writer is basically a simple app which is usefule for editing (reading/writing/updating) .schemas files for the GConf database. I would estimate that 60% of the parsing code is done, and 40% of editing code, and 0% of saving code :-). So if you want to contribute, or get started in a Gnome project which is not that huge, checkout the source from Gnome CVS (module: gconf-schemas-writer)